Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Karl Rove is a jerk Part 17

by digby

In this Fox "News" piece Rove rends his garments about how terrible that mean and nasty Barney Frank has been for the congress. It's very upsetting to courtly Republican gentlemen like Karl for politicians to be rude, don't you know --- it just makes them want to sit in a corner and have a good old fashioned cry. (And then in the ongoing pathetic conservative attempt to blame liberals for the global economic meltdown, he lies about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac some more, )

Perhaps Rove’s biggest initiative at Crossroads was conceptually modest, initially difficult to achieve, and ultimately potent: He convinced most other major independent groups aligned with the Republican Party to work together. “Groups tend to be territorial,” says Law. “They don’t like somebody else telling them what to do. And they’re especially proprietary about their information and their strategies and their donors.” Rove summarized his strategy via e-mail: “Invited them to lunch, suggested we all might be more effective and efficient if we shared our plans, shared costs and resources where possible.” The result is regular Washington meetings and coordination among groups like Crossroads, the Chamber of Commerce, and Americans for Prosperity (funded by the billionaire Koch brothers) to plot how to bedevil the Democrats in 2012.

Shapiro makes the interesting point that presidential Super-Pac advertising is unlikely to be all that influential because there are just so many ways for people to get information. It's down ticket where the danger lies:

... it’s on Capitol Hill where Democrats rightly fear Rove’s wrath. Mark Mellman, Reid’s pollster, admits to being “frightened” by Rove and his allies as Democrats struggle to hold the Senate. “You have a lot of potentially very close Senate races where one side with a fund-raising advantage can change everything,” Mellman says. Ali Lapp, who runs the House Majority PAC, a SuperPAC designed to help Democrats defy the odds and win back the House, puts it this way: “It’s a real fear that the Republicans will have a tidal wave of corporate and conservative money that could wash over everything.”

Rove is the guy who's coordinating all that and that's something he's apparently pretty good at.

Contribute to Blue America if you can. It's no American Crossroads, but it at least tells progressive politicians out there that somebody gives a damn and that's worth something.